From The Kitchen Table

There was once a book called the Shell Guide to London Weekends which featured ways in which Londoners could amuse themselves. Two sections always worried me slightly, mainly because I wrote them. Those sections are about ice skating (which I knew something about) and kite flying which I didn’t. Fortunately the book is decades out of print so I’m hoping there won’t be any disappointed kite-flyers writing to complain.

The editor of the SG to LW was a friend and he found he had too many subjects to cover so he farmed them out to reasonably educated and literate mates like me to do some research, find some names and write 250 words. The research required talking to people in the pub in case any of them knew about kite flying, then a bit of looking up stuff in the library and lot of looking up stuff in the phone book and some telephoning. I couldn’t help but feel I’d missed out on the good stuff, simply by not knowing about it.

In the Guardian last year there was a piece about bloggers who promote the cities they live in. The article felt a bit like my piece on kite flying -probably OK – workmanlike if not comprehensive. The selection seemed a bit random and rather small again like my kite flying and he missed out a couple of the sites I like.

My suspicions as to the depth of the research were heightened when I looked up the piece on-line and discovered that it had been amended because one of the sites had referred to Norwich in Vermont rather than Norwich Norfolk. Dear oh dear. Someone was in a hurry.

For the record one site I like is the Brummie Blogger which I visit a couple of times a month. I got interested for the obvious reason that one of my sons lives there and I like the city and so does he. Its got several good universities, two great art galleries, a lovely Georgian jewelry quarter, more canals than Venice (or so they keep saying) and also Harvey Nicks. As its in Birmingham I find it rather less intimidating than the Knightsbridge store – perhaps because it’s staffed by chic Brummies. The Blogger has, to be fair to the Guardian, moved more to diary mode than city promoter but nonetheless is a lovely fluent, natural writer who makes me laugh.

And the other is Diamond Geezer which I visit about every two months to remind me that London is still a city of hidden and half-hidden places (as well as a place of glittering hubris.) Geezer is a north Londoner I think while I’m a south Londoner by birth and inclination, or at least I was for the larger part of my life that I lived there. Now of course, I’m not qualified to say having swapped Catford for Oxford.

Picture: Student nurses with ward sister, St Thomas’ Hospital circa 1965

Here is quite a long story about the first journalist I ever met. It took place a long time ago in the middle of the night at St Thomas’s Hospital. I was, for the first time, the senior night nurse on duty which both excited and frightened me in equal measure. I was also on a ward where I had not worked before.

Opposite the desk where we put our sickest patients was a man who had returned from a long operation shortly before I arrived on duty. He was obviously very ill and in some pain. After taking the night report we checked his drips and drains and wounds. We sat him more comfortably in his bed, we gave him some analgesia and talked to him. As I turned to move on I heard him faintly speak and I leaned toward him to hear him whisper to me “thank you nurse.”

He was so ill, so weak and probably rather frightened but he still made that effort to thank me. At that moment I remember thinking that St Peter would have to wait because this one was mine for the time being.

That man was called Jack Marshall and over several long slow weeks he made a recovery. He was remarkable in several ways. Firstly, he had had a laryngectomy about 20 years before when his voice box had been removed to excise a cancer. He had been told that he would never speak again. But he did by inventing the system of speech known as oesophageal speech. This requires the speaker to swallow air and then force it back through the oesophagus. The speech is hoarse and whispered and also comes in short bursts of about five words.

He told me how it had come about. “Well, nurse – I used to drink whisky in those days – but after the operation – I took a lot of – soda in it. One day – I belched and -I just said pardon- out of habit – and the belch sounded – like the word. So nurse I practiced and – (triumphant smile ) I drank – a lot of whisky! He told me that he’d taught the actor, Jack Hawkins to use this form of speech (the only available to such people then) but that he was the most difficult pupil he’d every had probably because for an actor the loss of voice is such a profound loss.

And it was a loss for Jack too because he was working on the sports desk of the Daily Express and without a voice couldn’t use the phone or talk to other journalists or sports people. But with the use of much whisky -or so he said-he got back to the Express where, with the aid of a microphone attached to his telephone, he was back on the sports desk which is what he was doing when I walked him through the Valley of the Shadow and out the other side.

Later, he took me and several other nurses to the Express Building in Fleet Street one evening for a tour. He loved that paper and loved showing it off. And I doubt his reputation was damaged by being accompanied by half a dozen young women with very short skirts. We saw the news floors and the library and the canteen all busy and active as the first edition went to bed and then we went down Fleet Street to the Express pub. Jack bought me a whisky and introduced me to the political editor as ‘my nurse, she saved my life’. The political ed, digested this info and turned to me ‘so you saved his life?’ I smiled in what I hoped was a modest acknowledgement. ‘Don’t know why you bothered’, he said. Jack laughed, if not out loud, certainly enthusiastically. I thought it was hilarious and suitably deflating of any pomposity and it carried a degree of hospital-humour mordancy.

Whilst Jack was a patient of mine, he would greet me every morning and point out something or someone in the newspapers. He took the Express, of course, and the Times, both broadsheet. One day he called me over to show me a byline on the front page of the Times. ‘ That’s my daughter’. Rita Marshall, his daughter was the first woman to have a byline on the front page of Times and he was inordinately proud of her. One evening she came to me at the desk while I was doing the evening report and apologised for her father. I wasn’t certain what for but she said she was sure he must have been difficult so she’d thought it as well. I reassured her that we’d never seen anything but courtesy (although having pre-emptively apologised for my own father from time to time I did understand her motivation).

Jack died sometime in the later 70s and I haven’t come across Rita Marshall since. But I’ve never forgotten him (evidently) nor watching and hearing the presses roll under the magnificent old Express Building, or seeing the papers bound in batches loaded onto the vans to go to the stations and then on to the north. It seemed almost as exciting as my job. I realised that journalism didn’t necessarily mean spending a lot of time in Crewe recording weddings and garden fetes. And it was the first time I went home with a paper dated for a day that hadn’t actually arrived.

I take press calls at the Institute where I work so I always listen to the early morning news and try to predict what the story of the day might be. I’m rather better at it than I am at chasing a cheap flight but not much. Yesterday I thought it might be about Yahoo giving information about Chinese bloggers to the government resulting in two journalists ending up in jail. In fact it was about Gordon Brown trying to bring the legendry clunking fist to bear on internet providers in order to limit terrorist communications. A few days previously it was the Finnish killer and then the terrible murder of Leeds Student, Meredith Kercher. As well as doing interviews for Sky TV our expert wrote about it in some depth. Horribly compelling.

When I was asked yesterday what I wrote about on my blog I made sure that I avoided the truth which is, nothing since mid April. The trouble is that once started there’s not a lot of point in having a blog unless you write something from time to time. I dodged the question slightly and blathered a bit about social networking and contacts and the danger passed.

There’s a nice little cartoon in this week’s Private Eye ‘ a woman and man, he ‘drone, bore, me, mine’and she ‘Oh get a blog why don’t you?’ I have myself often opined that a good many blogs are like listening to the bloke in the pub without the benefit of a drink. Why don’t I just write a diary where I could at least be more frank?

This particular question came up at a meeting on journalism and blogging that I went to at the Frontline a few weeks ago. After the Virginia Tech shootings in April some soul searching went on after the students complained that journalists were looking at their blogs and social networks – MySpace and Facebook and using these e-conversations in their stories. I heard protests from students who felt their privacy had been grievously invaded by the journalists and that they wanted to be left alone to mourn.

In the talk, there was debate about the ethics of using blogs. My view is pretty much the same as Ben Hammersley formerly of The Guardian which was “The ethics come in when you publish it in a public space like the internet. If you want it private, write it down in a book and put it under your bed”

It was a good discussion and made me think about the blog phenomenon. As it happens there is no shortage of such comment on the net and much of it highly articulate. I got a headache thinking about what to reference and what not to and did it actually make a difference. So whilst I may have blathered a bit about the social network thing, actually that is where I’m going. And I’m going to leaven the faux serious stuff with a rag bag of random thoughts which I shall then stuff into the back of an electronic drawer where it won’t be found often. The quest for my blog voice is on although it is a little reedy not to say weedy just at the moment.

Meanwhile look forward or otherwise to posts on: – Funny Little Ways, Why do People Claim that their Job Title is in their Passports, When Did You Last hear Muzac in a Supermarket , People who I have met who have been Influential in my Life , assorted stuff about children, Is Oxford a squalid little town? and what are the RFP alumni doing these days – keep in touch.

When I heard on Sunday that a group which calls itself the Tawd and Jihad brigades claimed to have killed Alan Johnston I involuntarily gasped. My son, who had not been following the news asked me why and I unleashed a polemic aimed at the heavens about the self-destructive hubristic idiocy of such an action or even the claiming of the action.

I had been reflecting over the weekend on the bravery of Alan Johnston and indeed the bravery of many other journalists reporting from the dangerous fields. From the Philippines, Iraq and like my friend Walter Marwizi from Zimbabwe where he recently opened an envelope addressed to him and found a bullet. The deaths in Russia and the extraordinary example of bravery shown by Anna Politkovskaya who, and I do not apologise for the cliche, paid the ultimate price.

Once journalists were a relatively protected species when out covering conflicts far away. They died but were generally not the targets. Now, it is nearly an every day experience and it should concern all of us who rely on them to tell us about what is happening in places where not only we can’t be, but have no desire to be. Look at the reports on the International News Safety site to see the swelling numbers.

My reflections were leading to a short posting wandering a bit over the distances between the experiences of people who hold the absolute knowledge that what they are doing is as risky to their lives as would be crossing a motorway but carry on getting up, dressed and out into the world each day to do that very thing. And the rest of us who cannot know what that feeling or that drive is about.

I was going to ponder on the distance between the increasingly technological mediated news and old-style, smell-the-cordite (or at least the smoky back rooms of pubs) of the pre-tech news.

But it really doesn’t matter at all. I can’t write anything to add to the many words from people who know Alan Johnston and have worked with him. But I can suggest that you sign the BBC petition. It is the least, and sadly, also the most that I can do.